Aug 25, 2018 5 min read

Michelle Beadle feels like she’s been marginalized.

There’s a decent chance you’ve never heard of Beadle since she has been on an ESPN morning show that just about no one has watched. It’s called “Get Up!” and it has been a disaster. She co-hosted the show with Mike Greenberg and Jalen Rose until yesterday, when she was transferred from New York to Los Angeles to be part of a new NBA postgame show.

Her leaving won’t affect the ratings by a tenth of a percent and, with ESPN also announcing that “Get Up!” will be cut from three hours to two, it’s looking more and more like a show that’s headed down the toilet.

So, why does Beadle, who’s making $5 million a year feel marginalized?

Football.

Here’s what she said on the air Thursday in the aftermath of Ohio State coach Urban Meyer’s embarrassing press conference, where it was announced he would only be suspended for three games:

“There’s a reason this will be the second season I don’t watch NFL and I don’t spend my Saturdays watching college football, either. I believe that the sport of football has set itself up to be in a position where it shows itself in the bigger picture to not really care about women – they don’t really care about people of color, but we won’t get into that for NFL, either. But as a woman, I feel like a person who has been marginalized. And every single one of these stories that comes out, every single time, pushes me farther and farther away.”

She was obviously shocked and upset by the news that Meyer was getting off easy after lying about his assistant coach’s domestic abuse allegations.

So, during the first season of “Get Up!,” Beadle would show up on Monday morning for a sports talk show without having watched any football? Same thing on Tuesday morning, following Monday Night Football on the same network that was paying her $100,000 a week?

She also said she was counting the days until the start of the NBA season.

It took one day for ESPN to extend her contract and reassign her to the NBA job in L.A.

So, does the NBA care more about women and people of color than “football” does?

The NFL includes the Rooney family. Would Mike Tomlin agree that the guy who hired him, Dan Rooney, doesn’t care about people of color? And what is it about the NBA and college basketball that makes Beadle believe that “basketball” cares any more about women and people of color than “football?”

Has she ever heard of Rick Pitino?

How about the basketball players of color at North Carolina, who were borderline illiterate?

And does Beadle feel conflicted at all by taking her $100,000 per week from an employer that gets a major part of its revenue from a sport that marginalizes women and doesn’t care about people of color?

Maybe she’s a little too sensitive to be working for a major sports network that carries games that are played by so many bad people.

Why not apply to the Golf Channel?

• The Pirates and Brewers used 16 pitchers in a 15-inning game Thursday night. There were 13 runs, 29 hits and 33 strikeouts. That’s baseball in 2018. The Onion got it right when it said this recently:

“Saying the breakthrough would change baseball statistics forever, the Society Of American Baseball Research unveiled a new analytics model Friday that measures the precise amount of joy their work sucks from the game.

“For years, we’ve wondered exactly how much fun we drain from baseball, but finally, by combining the models from advanced statistics like OPS+ and BABIP, we were able to pinpoint the exact degree to which sabermetrics have turned America’s pastime into a miserable experience for casual and diehard fans alike.”

“This model can pinpoint the exact moment in which baseball goes from an exciting spectator sport to a numbing slog, devoid of all mystery and drama.”

I wish I had written it.

• Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi predicted his team would be playing in the ACC Championship game on Dec. 1. Good for him.
• Texas senatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke received praise far and wide when he said nothing is more American than the NFL players not standing for the national anthem. He also compared them to Rosa Parks and other heroes from the Civil Rights struggle. He should have been laughed off the stage for diminishing real heroes like Parks with that idiotic comparison.
• Until Friday, Major League Baseball teams were 0-58 when trailing by multiple runs in extra innings. The Brewers scored three runs in the bottom of the 15th in a 7-6 win over the Pirates.
• Terrell Pryor was suspended for five games while he was at Ohio State. He traded Ohio State gear for tattoos. Urban Meyer gets three games for turning a blind eye to his assistant coach’s domestic abuse allegations.
• The 2018 Pirates have about 100 more hits than strikeouts. The 1979 team – the last one to win a championship – had about 700 more hits than strikeouts.